Down to the Bone
by Parda
Summary: Not all immortals are rich, thin, and beautiful. Gertrude decides Amanda has more than she deserves.


**Down to the Bone  
**

**_by Parda, July 1999_

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**

"Whoo-eee!" the boy calls from across the street, his dirty pants held up with string, his dirty shirt all ragged holes. "That woman is ug-leee!"

His friends laugh, and I keep walking. Twelve blocks to walk, every evening, every morning. Two hundred steps every block. I start counting now. Eins, zwei, drei, fear...

"Man, she ain't just ugly; she is butt-ugly!" There is more laughter, and the boy is crossing the street. His friends come with him, a wolf-pack of black wolves, black-hearted, black-souled. This pack is schwarz, black-faced, but other packs have come in the years, dirty freckled Irish boys with filthy tongues who threw stones and dung when the roads were mud, blond boys in lederhosen in the old country.

"And what a butt!" A new voice now, a different wolf. "Just look at the way she walk! Toes out, knees out, butt out." More laughter, falling over themselves, and I know - I do not need to look - I know he is walking behind me, walking like me.

"No tits out, though. She ain't got no tits." The first one again, the leader. "Hey, Mama!" he calls to me. "Hey, Mama, what you doing walking like that round here? We don't need to look at you ugly white face. You ugly butt-face."

I could kill him. I know how. I have killed before. Sometimes for want, sometimes for need, sometimes for pleasure. But there are too many here. Dreiundzwanzig, vierundzwanzig, fuenfundzwanzig...

"Go on, mama!" he yells as I cross the street and leave his hunting area. "Get you ugly white butt and you ugly face out of here!" The others laugh and whistle and cheer.

Achtunddreissig, neununddreissig... Neununddreissig strokes they gave to our Lord, thirty-nine lashes with the whip. Forty will kill. I know.

The work is the Schufterei, the drudgery, and I am the drudge. Scrub and flush, scrub and flush. All the toilets need to be cleaned. Six in the men's room, eight in the women's room. Six bathrooms on the fourteenth floor, six bathrooms on the fifteenth floor, and then I am done for the night. I have had this job four years.

I have been a drudge for four hundred, scrubbing other people's shit. Toilets are easier than chamber pots. "Gertrude," Frau Kerner says to me, her cap white and starched over her gray hair, her long skirts sweeping over the scrubbed stone floor, the stone floor I have scrubbed on my hands and knees, "this is not clean." I scrub the chamber pot again.

"Gertrude," Mrs. Collins says, my name all flat in her mouth, coming through her nose like so many Amerikaner say it. Even my name is ugly now, now that I have left my homeland for this new country, this country where they say there are no wars and no soldiers who rape and burn and steal, this place where Germans are not wanted. My words come ugly, too, for the English does not sound right on my tongue, and the others laugh at my speaking, so I am silent. I do not sing anymore, not even the nursery tunes, but I remember them.

_Maikaefer flieg_

_Dein Vater ist im Krieg_

_Die Mutter ist in Pommerland_

_Pommerland ist abgebrannt_

_Maikaefer flieg._

Fly, little beetle. Your father is in the war, your mother is in the Pommerland, and the Pommerland is burned. Fly, beetle, fly.

I will never be able to fly.

"Gertrude," Mrs. Collins says, her eyes cold and dead like the white-bellied fish in the Markt, "this is filthy, just like you." I scrub it again, and listen to the whistle of the steam train going by.

No one watches me do my work now. I am alone. The building is quiet, though other drudges are on other floors. Later, we will gather and drink tea or coffee or something stronger, and the other women will talk of beautiful people on TV shows, share news of their lumbago and their housemaid's knee, then complain of their husbands and brag of their children. They will speak of sex, of "making love." I will say nothing. I live alone, and family and love are not for me.

I rise and flush the toilet, then move to the next stall. The garbage needs to be emptied: tissue paper full of snot, pads full of darkened blood, sometimes a condom full of cum. I clean it all and move along. This is my job.

I have tried other jobs, tried to learn to read. "No, Gertrude," the teacher says, slapping my hands away, "this is a 'd' and this is a 'b'. Are you stupid or blind?" The letters crawl on the page and I see nothing. I am stupid and blind. I do not try again. It is not for me.

My daughter learns to read, pretty Liesl who goes to school while I carry water for the stores in the Marktplatz. "I will teach you, Mutti," she says, but I laugh and tell her no. "You will read to me." She does, and I tell her stories I know, while we lie in bed together to keep warm.

"The haessliche Entlein stayed by himself all winter, while fierce winds blew and the ice froze. He was cold and hungry and all alone. When the springtime came, the ugly duckling saw great white birds, and he went to them, even though he thought they would kill him. He could not stop himself, for they were beautiful."

"But he was a swan, too, was he not, Mutti?" asks Liesl, who has heard this story before. It is her favorite, and it has become one of mine.

"Yes, mein Liebes, he was a swan," I say, and I hug her to me. She hugs me back and kisses my cheek. "He had grown up to be beautiful. He lived with them, and he was happy."

We are happy, too, until the fever comes and burns her up and the Herr Doktor takes our money. She dies while I am sleeping, my little baby I found in the street and took home. She is nine years old. My other children die younger. My last daughter survives, but I am dead to her.

"You cannot come here," Bertha whispers, her voice quiet in the dark street, the houses shuttered for the night.

"I bring presents, for the kinder," I say. My basket is heavy on my arm with sweet things to eat, things I have saved my money for, to give to little Hans and baby Giselle.

Bertha looks about for the watchmen, then takes the basket from me and starts to shut the door.

"I wish to see my grandchildren!" I protest.

"They are not your grandchildren!" she hisses. "And I am not your daughter."

"Bertha...," I say, my own voice a whisper. I cared for her for twenty years, carried her in my arms, sang her to sleep, held her hands while she gave birth. "Daughter..."

"You do not age, woman," she accuses, and it is true. "People have started to talk of you, of demons." I shake my head, and she cries out, "They are burning witches in the square, and I do not want you in my house!"

The door is shut in my face, and the street is filled with echoes. They die away.

I finish with the toilets and scrub the sinks, fill the soap dispensers, check the towels. Time for the fifteenth floor. Eins, zwei, drei... Thirty-nine to go.

I finish for the night, and as I leave the building, I feel another Immortal, very far away. My sword is with me, but the other women fill the lobby with their chatter, and I watch as the other Immortal drives away in a car. She seems in no hurry; maybe she did not sense me. She is thin and tall, her dark hair too short, her clothes too tight. Even from here I can see she is beautiful. She has no place with us drudges here in the early hours of the morning.

She disappears, and I do not follow, but I will have that beauty. She has no right to it.

The walk home is quiet, the sun just up. The wolves sleep late in the morning. Families get ready for the day. A girl of three holds a kitten on her lap, sitting in her yard, under the new green leaves of a tree.

"Here's a kitten, Traudl," Katrin says to me, her blonde hair wisping about her face, her blue eyes anxious and hurried. The inn is busy and noisy this morning, with many soldiers, all in blue and red clothes and high black boots.

"Katrin!" the big man calls, the soldier-man with hard hands and cold eyes, the man who called me graessliches Balg, ugly child, just last night, while he patted Katrin on the backside and called her huebsch, pretty. She is. I am not, even then. "It is time," he yells. "Beeil dich!"

"The kitten will be your friend," she says, pressing the soft gray thing into my hands.

It mews and sinks its claws into my thumb, and my friend Katrin turns to go. "Don't leave, Katrin!" I say. "Don't leave me!"

She does not stop, but goes to be with the man, and she walks behind the cart pulled by the old brown horse, while the soldiers march ahead. I am left in the courtyard in the corner of the stones. I drop the kitten, and it runs across to the stables, where another cart crushes it beneath its wheel, a scrap of bloody gray fur, greasy red on the cobblestones.

I never see Katrin again. I am five years old.

The child of three plays with her kitten. Her mother calls: "Shellie, time for breakfast." The girl carries her kitten and hurries inside to her mother and her food, and daffodils wave yellow above the grass.

I walk on.

Breakfast is my dinner, and I am hungry. I have often been hungry. "That's all, Gertrude," Herr Schmidt says when I reach for another piece of the good brown bread. There is half a loaf left, but it is for his family, not for his farm-workers who spend all day in his fields cutting his hay. "She eats like a horse," giggles little Elsa. "She looks like a horse," her brother Kurt adds, and they all laugh.

"She's got a face like a sack of potatoes," Mr. Collins says to his wife, a hundred years later, when he thinks I cannot hear. "She'll never get a man."

He is wrong. I count five men among my sixteen kills. Not all the men were handsome, but all the women have been beautiful.

I eat well today: sausage, three eggs, four pieces of the good brown bread. I make my own bread, and I buy real butter, not the yellow grease. My face glimmers back from the top of the toaster, sprinkled with crumbs, two black bars cutting my face into three pieces. The smallpox scars still show. People now think it is acne. My teeth - the ones I have - show yellow, but they are strong. Horses' teeth. Immortality came too late for me. Or maybe life came too early. I butter my toast and then add the gelee, the blackberry kind. Food is good.

My apartment is small and I keep it clean, but the roaches still come. At least there are no ratten. This is what I can afford.

I practice with my sword this morning, and the black hilt is smooth under my hands. I could use a bigger sword, for I am tall and strong, but this one was a gift. My moves are not graceful, not the dance I have seen in others, but they are deadly. I know.

The day is cool, so I open both windows. The couch-springs creak under me when I lie down. When I wake, I will go hunting.

Hunting takes time, and patience, and luck. So does killing. "It is not easy to kill," says my teacher, the Lady Ailis, her pale-blue eyes old in a young, pretty face. "You must work at it."

I am a good worker. "Yes, Gertrude!" she says as I thrust the blade into the straw bag, and she smiles at me. I work hard for her.

We stay at a convent, auf geweihtem Boden, on Holy Ground, where I will be safe. The Lady explains it all to me, when we first meet, when I feel sick at the sight of her. "Have you been ill lately?" she asks me when she summons me to her room. "Or hurt?"

"Nein, edle Dame," I say, for I have not been sick for ten years, and I have not been hurt, either. Not for long. I stare at the colored cloth on the floor and keep my dirty feet away, standing on the cold stones. I have never been inside the master's house before. I sleep in the barn.

"A blow to the head?" she asks. "A wound? And then you woke up?"

"There were soldiers, edle Dame," I tell her, wondering how she knew. "Ten years ago. They came through the village." I do not want to say more, and I do not want to remember, but the memories are still there, even today.

She tells me all then, that I am unsterblich, Immortal, and so is she. That she is nine hundred years old, that I must learn to use a sword and protect myself against those who want my head, that she will teach me. I follow her to the convent. I would have followed her anywhere.

The holy sisters leave us alone, for the Lady Ailis is very rich and pays them well. She teaches me many things. "You must be strong," she tells me, though she is small and weak. "Do not think of yourself as a woman." That part is easy for me. "You must fight like an Immortal." That part is not.

"Good, Traudl! Much better!" she tells me one day as we spar, and I am happy.

"Fight with whatever you can," the Lady says, and she uses her own weapons well. Beauty, the look of youth, money, knowledge, the noble name - they are all weapons in the games people play.

Her weapons, not mine. I am never to have those weapons. I must find my own.

I hunt by patience, and I am patient now. The Immortal I sensed when I left the building has been in that building before; one of the guards tells me so when I go early to my job tonight.

"I saw a woman like that," Charlie says, "yesterday afternoon." He whistles, a low wolf sound. Wolves hunt for different things.

I am hunted for my head, not for my body. Soldiers come to the convent I live in, and they do not care about Holy Ground and Holy Sisters, for they are Lutheraner, Protestants. Nuns are the same as whores to them. Young Sister Hilda screams and runs for the church, but they catch her easily before she reaches the door. "Just pretend I'm a priest," the bearded one says, and he pulls up her skirts and takes her on the stairs, while the others watch and wait their turns.

There is an Immortal in the group, and after he takes his turn, he heads for me. "Why bother with that ugly one?" another soldier asks. "I'd as soon fuck a pig."

The Immortal laughs and says, "You have, Karl! You have." The other soldiers laugh and jeer, but the Immortal keeps his eyes on me, coming closer. Sister Hilda has stopped screaming, but they are not done with her yet. The Immortal is not done with me, either. My sword is under my gown, the plain gray gown of a lay sister, and I put my hand on the hilt. I will not go easy.

An officer rides in, a short man on a tall horse, his feather plumes white on a green velvet hat.

The Lady Ailis wore green velvet sometimes. I have not seen her for fifty years. "There is a man," she has told me. "A man named Henri. I must find him." She has not yet come back, and I am no longer waiting. I think she is dead.

"Finish here," the officer commands the men. "We must move on." The soldiers mutter and hesitate, and the officer dismounts and runs Sister Hilda through with his sword. "Move on!"

The soldiers form into ranks and leave, but the Immortal looks at me before he goes. He will not have to come back to find me. Sister Hilda dies on the steps, and I place her body before the altar, a sacrifice bathed in blood, in the blood of the lamb. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. Have mercy on us.

Mercy is not for Immortals. I follow the soldiers, and the Immortal comes out to meet me, for he knows I am there. He thinks I will be easy, but the Lady Ailis taught me well. The fight is ugly, and so I must win. He dies on his knees, his blood bright red as it melts the white snow. The fir trees stand dark around us.

I use his knife to take off his balls, and when he revives I show them to him, a warm sac in my hands, my fingers slippery with his blood. His eyes are wide with pain and terror, but he does not scream, for his cock is in his mouth. His sins are his own, and I will not take them away from him.

I wait until night before I take his head; I want the cover of darkness to hide in after the quickening. He struggles now and then, and I kill him each time. It is not so hard after all.

He is my first beheading, my first quickening, and I enjoy it. Perhaps that is my sin. The lightning shatters the top of a tree, and the snow melts with sizzles and pops. Blood boils and blackens beneath him, and then it is done. He is mine now, saecula saeculorum, for ages of ages, et cum spiritu meo, and with my soul.

_Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis._

_Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis._

_Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem._

Grant us peace.

Peace is not for Immortals. I go to the fourteenth floor, and I began to scrub. If she has been here twice, she might be here again. I will wait.

I have only one more bathroom to clean when I sense her, the faintest whisper as the elevator whisks by, going up. I follow on the stairs, my mop and bucket left behind, my sword in my hand. This is my true work, meine Arbeit.

She is on the seventeenth floor, a good omen for my seventeenth kill. The door stands open, and she is all in tight black leather, matching her black hair, a long-necked black swan. She holds a statue in one hand, a sword in the other. The statue is a thing of beauty. I will take that beauty for my own. I will take that head.

"Working late, aren't we, honey?" she says as she carefully sets the statue in her bag, then moves behind the desk for cover, her sword still in her hand. "Look, we don't have to fight."

I do not answer, but advance.

"I'll give you some of the money I get from the statue," she offers, smiling, offering her friendship. If I were a man, she would offer me her body, fighting with all the weapons she has, making a whore of herself to survive. Her friendship is as worthless as her love.

I take another step. I will slice that lovely neck.

"OK, fine," she says, annoyed now, shrugging her shoulders, her breasts moving higher, too. She comes out from behind the desk, and then she stops as she looks at my sword. "Where did you get that?"

It is a gift.

"That sword belongs to Ailis," the dark Immortal says.

"Ailis is dead," I tell her, and it is true. Ailis has been dead these two last hundred years. "How did you know her?"

"I'm Amanda," she tells me.

I have never heard the name.

"Ailis and I were friends." Then she looks at me again. "You were her student. You are Gertrude."

She knows how to say my name, the old way, the German way. It sounds almost pretty again, but I am not and will never be. Her friendship with the whore does not matter. The Game goes on. I tell Ailis that, the last time I see her.

Ailis is surprised to see me, as she stands alone in her hotel room, her sword in her hand, her eyes wide with shock. "Gertrude!" she exclaims, but she says no more, for I kill her quickly. I have seen her earlier that day, laughing with a fair-haired handsome man as they rode in a carriage through the streets. She is still young, still wealthy, always beautiful, always loved, always the whore, while I trudge along, head down, always ugly, always alone.

"I thought you were dead," I tell her when she revives in a quiet place far from town, "when you didn't come back. You told me to wait, and then you never came back. You went to be with him." She shakes her head, but says nothing, for I have gagged her with her pretty silk handkerchief. I do not want to hear more of her lies. I use her sword to take her head, and then I take her sword. It is a thing of beauty. It is a gift I give to myself.

"Gertrude," Amanda says to me now, her dark eyes watchful, "I don't want to fight you. Ailis asked me to look for you, to help her find you."

Lies.

"She told me she couldn't find you when she finally escaped from Henri and took his head, after he kept her locked up for fifty years."

Somehow I know that this is not a lie, and suddenly I know everything else is. The sword - Ailis's sword - is heavy in my hand. It is a gift, a poison, and it has killed me, and I have killed the one I loved, the one who loved me. Kyrie, eleison. Christe, eleison.

Mercy is not for me.

I let the sword go. I let Amanda go, too, and she takes the things of beauty with her - the statue, the sword, her head.

Beauty is not for me, and springtime will never come.

The last bathroom on the fifteenth floor still needs cleaning, and that is my job. Scrub and flush, scrub and flush. Eins, zwei, drei... Five more to clean tonight, and then eighty-four again tomorrow night, and the night after that. Vier, fuenf, sechs...

Nein.

This is my life.

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TRANSLATIONS**_

_In German, Gertrude is pronounced "Gahr-trud-ah" with soft rolling Rs. In English, it often sounds like "Grr-trewd."_

_Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. (Latin): Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the word, have mercy on us._

_Kyrie, eleison. Christe, eleison. (Greek); Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy._

_"Gift" means poison in German._

"_Eins, zwei, drie…" is one, two three…_

_Acht is eight, neun is nine.__ Nein is no._

_Zwanzig is twenty.

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_**ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:**_

_- to Tanja, for her help with the German language, German customs, and German stories, and for her excellent suggestions about many other things as well. Danke._

_- to Cathy and Bridget, for beta-reading and encouragement._

_- to Gillian, whose story "Something Borrowed, Something Blue" prompted me to try writing in the 1st person, present tense, for a change._


End file.
